How to Dehydrate Chicken Stock for Food Saving

Chicken stock is a base for many soups and other recipes and a great thing to stock up on but how to stock up on it for prepping purposes has left little options other than commercial bouillon which is loaded with MSG in various forms, often it also contains caramel coloring, which is a cancer causing carcinogen, it’s high in refined salt and usually contains a whole slew of other chemicals as well.

First start with an organic pasture raised chicken. This is very important for health reasons.

Most chickens commercially raised for food today are confined to cages for most of their lives, living in cesspools of manure and disease, given loads of antibiotics to fend off the diseases and fed grains like genetically modified, pesticide saturated corn and soy.

Often the chicken feed is also supplemented with roxarsone, an arsenic-based food additive, in order to bulk them up and prevent parasites from forming in their systems. So if you eat non-organic chicken you’re also likely getting arsenic poisoning as well so start with an organic pasture raised chicken.

Cook or roast the chicken and remove the cooked meat from the bones. You can dehydrated the cooked chicken as well for other uses.

Place the bones and carcass in a pot filled with filtered purified water and add a little Himalayan Pink Salt if you like. Pure unrefined pink salt contains all 84 mineral elements that the human body consists of in ideal proportions. All these minerals are in the perfect crystal matrix and ultimate ionic form (electrically charged) and are attached in a structure that makes the minerals easily accessible by our cells so this is a healthy salt to use.

Adding salt is optional but I like to add a little bit so when it dehydrates the salt can be an extra level of preserving. People have used salt for centuries to preserve meat so it stands to reason it would help preserve the stock as well.

Boil the bones and carcass for about an hour or so, remove the bones from the stock and pour the chicken stock through a sieve to filter out any remaining particles and refrigerate the chicken stock overnight to let it congeal.

Chicken stock before refrigeration:

When it congeals it should look like this:

The next step is to skim off all the fat on the top. This is an important step that you cannot skip if you mean to dehydrate the stock and store it. Oils and fats will go rancid pretty quickly and also don’t dehydrate well either and will keep your stock from dehydrating properly so make sure to skim off all of the fat.

Once all the fat is skimmed off put the fat free chicken stock back into a pan and reduce the chicken stock to about 2 Tbsp.

Picture courtesy of Petra Canup

Next pour the reduced stock onto a sheet of parchment paper or the non-stick drying sheets that came with your dehydrator.

Finished Product:

You can click on the picture to enlarge it.

For longer term storing you can put the dehydrated chicken stock into a mylar bag with an oxygen absorber packet and store it away with your other preps.